Video content in NTSC
format (as in the original footage, also compatible with most
PAL DVD
players, including 100% of those tested by us in 2005)

Menus and subtitles in English and Italian

These are, in our opinion, "must see" videos about the Amiga,
the C64 and
Commodore in general, which took a lot
of time and hard work to create and process, also licensing hard-to-find
materials that were presented to the general public for the first time in
Amiga Forever.

This video collection will allow you to connect people and facts in new
ways, as it better exposes the relationship between
Commodore, the Amiga, an
increasingly mature PC market, and the ups and downs of the video games
industry. The videos also contain
touching biographical parts, TV ads, precious insights into the history of personal
computing and multimedia, and many an interesting lesson in project and
business management, with a special focus on areas such as IT, startups,
the consumer market and the video games industry.

We took the extra effort of adding subtitles in
multiple languages in order to make these pieces of Amiga history and
culture accessible to the widest possible audience. In addition to consuming
an enormous amount of internal resources, the transcriptions and the translations would not
have been possible without the generous help of a group of several dozen
volunteers from all over the world.

Technical Details

The original sources of all videos usually were NTSC VHS tapes, often
chosen from the best version of multiple available ones, and in a few cases
combining the best data from different tapes. The Jay Miner Speech video was
digitized from a combination of Beta SP tape for the event footage and
digital MPEG data for the original titles. The Jay Miner interview has its
own story. The Dave
Haynie interview was digitized from a combination of 8 mm video and an
additional MD audio source. The
videos were digitized, enhanced and encoded to the highest quality standards
using the latest technology.

We took the greatest care in handling and converting the original tapes,
using professional conversion labs and equipment, and we kept digital copies
(in part uncompressed) to preserve the materials from the slow decay of analog
tapes. Like our software archives, this data is stored at multiple locations
and using file systems that incorporate bitrot detection and repair
mechanisms.

Future releases may be
superresolution-enhanced
and/or be encoded using technologies other than MPEG-2 (a current DVD
standard). Actually, superresolution technology (which combines data from
multiple video frames to generate higher-resolution frames) has already been
used to create some of the still pictures used on the Amiga Forever
packaging and web site.

Ongoing Work

Amiga Forever as a whole, and its videos in particular, are a
manifestation of a multiplicity of challenges we are facing. Like any
passionate but small organization, we wish we had more resources available.
As a successor of Commodore/Amiga we feel an additional burden and sense of
duty for a cultural heritage that should be neither lost nor locked away.

Cloanto has been considering the idea of setting up a
nonprofit/foundation dedicated to preservation for some time, and we hope
that other projects may be successful enough to make this possible. In the
meantime, some original content is currently exclusive to the Amiga Forever
documentary series and helps support our ongoing preservation and
dissemination work. We are also working with some of the most renowned
preservation institutions to make sure that this legacy is preserved and
will remain accessible for posterity.

Ongoing efforts include:

Collecting and preserving new materials, and best-quality versions
of existing materials

Work on a new documentary using 3D HD technologies

Adding subtitles for new content, and in more languages (in
particular German, Spanish, French and Japanese)

Releasing more content via online channels

We found the experience of creating transcripts and subtitles, which inevitably includes the
repeat watching and listening to the same footage, to be quite rewarding
also from the point of view of getting an almost intimate inside view of the
stories told in the videos. If you would like to assist in this field, please
get in touch.

We are always looking for new videos to preserve and make available.
We keep being surprised by how new and better-quality content emerges from
time to time, even decades after it was shot.

If you have an interesting video or suggestion, or if you found any
inaccuracies in the transcripts or subtitles, please
let us know.